In my book, The Rules of Art,2 I demonstrated that the intellectual
world is an autonomous world within the social world, a microcosm
which constituted itself progressively through a series of struggles. In
the history of the West, the first to acquire their autonomy with regard
to power were the jurists, who in twelfth century Bologna succeeded
in asserting their collective independence in relation to the Prince,
and, simultaneously, their rivalry amongst themselves. As soon as a
field is constituted and asserts its existence, it asserts itself into the
internal struggle. It is one of the properties of “fields” that the question
of belongingness to this universe is at stake in the very midst of
these universes. Suppose that, like a French historian by the name of
Viala, one makes a study of the French writers of the seventeenth
century: one uncovers lists of writers, one compiles these lists and one
undertakes to describe the social characteristics of the writers. In
terms of a good positivist method, it is beyond reproach; in fact, I
believe that it is a serious error.